Politics, Religion, Education, Perspective and Reality as I know it, with a good dose of humor and some small bit of navel gazing. Promoting peace, the sacred center of our humanity, with belief that when humans are our best and most joyous selves the world changes for the better.
See also crankycindy.blogspot.com where I post on my less optimistic days.

Monday, October 17, 2005

This makes me feel bedder about my spelin'

My mom sent me this, it's been floating around the internet.

Can you read this? Srmat poelpe can.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

4 comments:

Does this really work for all languages, or just English (or just Romanized languages, or some other subset)? I read Japanese and I don't think you can mess with kanji (the Chinese character system) and still have them be intelligable. My wife reads Arabic, and from what I've gleaned from her I'm doubtful this would work with Arabic or Arabic-derived scripts (i.e. Farsi, Urdu, classical Turkish, etc) either. Not sure Sanksrit or derived scripts (Hindi, Pali, Tibetan, etc) would work either. A whole host of pictogram-based languages (such as Mayan, classical Egyptian, etc) also seem like poor candidates for this experiment. So put these "exceptions" together and you've just eliminated most of the human race.

That said, it really is amazing that I can read that garbled paragraph. Weird, weird, weird! And sort of cool. Blows my mind, really.

Maybe it's because English is such a stpuid langauge with stpuid rules that we've had to leern not to pay too close attention. Yup, it'd suck if medical terms were like this.

Mconahitdriol disease.

yea, that doesn't really become Mitochondrial disease, does it?

I bet you're right Jeff about the pictogram based languages.

So, would it work for French, German or Italian? For Swahili? Letter based (I'm sure there's a more accurate linguistic term) languages? Anyone with fluency want to take a stab? (although I suspect that if Google can change Happy Cindy Changes the World to Cindy Heureux Change Le Monde, hmmm.. Hold on, starting with Google translation, (my first mistake) i've mixed up the letters in this french version of the first bit. Someone who speaks French read this or send it on to someone who didn't see the original english version.